There has been a lot of complaints lately about how newbies get picked on when they're unable to defend themselves. It would therefore seem like a good idea to give them a slight advantage until they have a chance to get a feel for the game. However simply giving them more speed or hull plating will not save them from ace pilots. The advantage I had in mind was improved auto targeting inversely proportional to the player's score. A total newbie with a score of 0 would be a fantastic shot, but as he worked his way up he would eventually have to learn better aim. By the time he reached a benchmark, say 10000 points, the auto targeting would be back to normal levels. This way, even new players would stand a chance against trigger happy vets.

I think the solution is ultimately in a 'safe' RP environment, like the first few levels of a dungeon where the hazard are tightly controlled. Besides which I don't like score and I can't think of a good excuse why neophytes would be better shots than veterens so I think it kills emmersiveness. I do think you have a good idea though, in that I wouldn't mind having 'skill points' you could invest in 'gunnery' that would slightly improve the autotargeting radius of energy weapons.

Lastly, I don't think it is thier inability to aim that gets newbies into trouble; it's thier poor tactics and low situational awareness. The biggest way to help newbies with gadgets would be have players alerted when they were targeted our when hostile ships closed to within 300m or so.

Better yet, switch the positions of 3/6, 1/4, and 2/12. Make the "newbie sectors" inaccessable to players of another nation. This would solve several problems:

A) Vet goes into newbie sector, kills newbies, claims he is capping (TPi comes to mind).

B) A *real* safe place to be for newbies. They can bot, etc there. If they want the "real thing," they can come out, knowing their ship is at risk.

Yes, that has been proposed so many times, I just hope the devs are addressing this at the moment as we speak :D

you know the update, the revolution ;)

cheers

Better yet, put 3-6 'security bots' in 1,2,3,4,6 & 12 that are 'teamed' respectively and which hunt down any hostile in 3000m and which respawn every 10 minutes or so and which work together like the 350 wing bots. Also replace the weapons in the turrets with the turret weapon on the frigates and double the number in each sector. Add a 'teamed' 'frigate' in 1,2, and 3 located 600m or so beyond the flag.

That way you don't break the continuity of the game, but you still give 'n00bs' a huge advantage in protecting themselves on thier home turfs. Then as the game grows create deeper and deeper layers of this sort of security and simultaneously protect the n00bs and give each nation a feeling of 'national space' and create a sense of community between the PC and the NPC's. Eventually the goal is for the PC's to see themselves as being as 'part of the same team' that the NPC's are on (both the ones flying the ships and those in the stations).

Agreed. The current turrets suck a lot! With a range of 200m, you can stand at 250 and get sure kills easily. Maybe we should have an entirely new ship equipped with the frigate's weapon. Make it like a wraith, but with 20k armor. or something like that

[/stupid idea]

Well, speaking of, does anyone know what the firing rate and velocity of the frigate weapon is? I'm both wondering how much energy it should use if it where a fighter weapon, and whether it would make a reasonablely balnced 'heavy blaster' in the large weapon slot.

It does WAY too much damage! It appears to have the firing rate of the adv gatling, but at least 2x the damage. Plus better auto-targetting. Sheesh!

It does 1200 damage. It appears to have about the firing rate of a tachyon. If that is the case, it might be ok to have it cost only twice as much to fire as a tachyon, but I think it is also faster than a tachyon too.

The auto-targetting is irrelevant. It's in a turret. Presumably on a ship it would be mounted on centerline.

So it does 3x the damage and has 0.75x the firing rate. The leads to... 8000 damage per second, as opposed to the adv gatling. What a BALANCED weapon. Celebrim, I'm ashamed of you! ~3 seconds to kill a Promy? Heck, you could kill the frigate with such a gun.

Err... the advanced gatling never was a leader in damage per second.

It does 1200 damage. Tachyons do 600 damage. That's x2 not x3. All other things being equal, it would be the equivalent of putting two tachyons in the large slot (of course I have a sneaking suspicion all other things are not equal, but lets ignore that for now and change the efficiency when we get better data). It would (lets suggest) do 6000 damage per second. This is less than old rate of damage for gravitons, and less than the damage rate of blue ions (a weapon we all used to carry). It would only be 50% higher than the damage rate for adv. gatlings, cost a little more power to use, have worse tracking, and have no scatter effect (both good and bad sides to that). We could play with the efficiency to get some balance vs. the plasma cannon (which needs its damage upped anyway).

But my main interest is in the characteristics of the weapon because I'm courious as to how much power the Frigate _in theory_ is consuming per second (although I know that the real answer to that is actually 0). That it might make for a intesting direct fire weapon in a role that no large weapon currently fills is only a secondary interest.